Pema Chodron Quotes

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

We don't like admitting this, but it is a key component of human existence: the fact that life has the potential for things both wondrous and horrific.

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.

I'm full of contradictions.

Human beings are flawed and complicated and messy.

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.

The good thing about people really is their iffy-ness and dodginess, isn't it?

Sometimes as human beings, we're so contradictory - we may say something or do something and completely contradict ourselves. That's what I'm learning to embrace in television - not knowing what's going to happen.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

In the minds of most men, the kingdom of opinion is divided into three territories,--the territory of yes, the territory of no, and a broad, unexplored middle ground of doubt.

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

Being at a loss to resolve these questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.

People are concrescences of ambiguity.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

Every body drags its shadow, and every mind its doubt.

Mysteries simply are a feast for an active mind. And while in my lifetime I've seen science make extraordinary inroads into solving the most complex questions of life, after all this time I admit that I am thrilled that there are some things that forever will remain a mystery. For example, do I wear a toupee?

I never make my mind up about anything at all, until it's over and done with.

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,- The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

The meaning of life is that nobody knows the meaning of life.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.